A More Semantic Web is In Our Future

Ankit Mathur recently wrote in IndraStra, “There are two aspects to the possible future of the Web; one is that it is definitely going to be more social and more people-centric, but the other important characteristic is that it’s going to be more semantic in nature. The Web technologies that we have available today focus more on how pages are displayed and what content is displayed, rather than on the content itself. The semantic Web is a facet of technology that will allow this content to become meaningful for machines, and will enable them to process this content and help us share, combine and analyse content effectively.”

Mathur goes on, “To make it clear, let me give you the example of Wikipedia. It has all the information in the world about everything related to rivers, but can I query it to find out about the longest river in India? I guess not, because I will have to search for it manually before retrieving that information, and there is no way to get this data programmatically from Wikipedia in its present form. Enter DBpedia, and you will be surprised to find that you can do much more than that. During the course of this article, we’ll look at how this happens.”

He continues, “But why go through all the hassle, you might ask? Well, natural language processing (NLP) is one field that could benefit from this. I’m not much of a fan of the Apple iPhone ecosystem, but we must agree that Siri is really an impressive feature. Having a machine that can easily interact with humans and answer random queries will be the next leap in the evolution of computing.”